‘The Magnificent Ruins’ is an inviting novel of family dysfunction

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The Magnificent Ruins, By Nayantara Roy, Algonquin. 436 pp. $29

There must be some families somewhere that peacefully transfer real estate, but they don’t get much press. At least since Jacob and Esau, stories about property have been a stew of strife. If you don’t believe me, talk to the lawyers for King Lear’s daughters – a bleak house among many.

Nayantara Roy uses this age-old conflict as the spark for her engrossing debut novel, “The Magnificent Ruins.” The narrator is Lila De, a smart young book editor at a New York publishing company that’s just been bought by a billionaire. For Lila, the acquisition means a huge promotion, but just as her publishing house is being radically upgraded, a house of a different sort disrupts her life.

In the summer of 2015, Lila receives news that she’s inherited her grandfather’s palatial old residence – a grand five-story building with carved pillars and Roman windows. This is hardly an unencumbered windfall, though. The house is 8,000 miles away in India – location, location, location! And what’s even more complicated: The house is inhabited by three generations of Lila’s family. Professionally, the timing couldn’t be worse, but Lila secures permission for an eight-week leave of absence and flies off to Kolkata to figure out what she should do with her ancestral home.

It’s no accident that we use the word “story” to describe the levels of a house and the plot of a book. Roy’s roomy novel draws us deep into the way family history is inscribed on buildings. With “The Magnificent Ruins,” she proves herself a daring architect, taking full advantage of this sprawling plot to explore a family shaken to its foundation.

Lila is an immensely engaging narrator, impressively confident but endearingly vulnerable, with a dangerous touch of naivete about her own and others’ motives. How deeply you fall in love with her – clearly, I’m smitten – will determine how swept away you are by this itinerant tale.

She arrives at her late grandfather’s house to find a pantheon of relatives delighted to see her and alarmed that they’re suddenly her tenants. Despite the family’s declining financial situation, few of them work. Content to maintain the mirage of British-era gentility, they’ve all lived together in this giant house for so long that any whisper of change is unthinkable. Lila finds herself stepping into a Bengal version of “Arrested Development.”

No one – from Grandma on down – seems to know why Lila’s grandfather left the family house to her. A few jealous relatives suggest that perhaps the old man was out of his mind. Lila worries the family will contest his will, and she’s shocked by how much she cares. While she initially thinks of the house as merely an extravagant inheritance, eventually she realizes that its walls feel like they were made from her own bones.

Like any solution-oriented American, she immediately begins using the estate’s funds to refurbish the building, which seems to have received no maintenance for years. All this business and the resistance it stirs generate much of the novel’s conflict and comedy. “Bengal was not an anxious state,” Lila notes. “It took its time with words and life, a lazy luxury to all that passed through its sieve. My urgency felt foreign.”

When it comes to identifying what ruffles the family feathers, Roy is a superb ornithologist. She can catch every warbling tone of passive aggression. Speaking a “secret language of things unsaid,” her relatives act out ancient grudges, slights and hurt feelings. “We were all frozen in time,” Lila says. Accordingly, her family greets every improvement with wild appreciation and secret suspicion. The new elevator is convenient, yes, but is it haunted? And they can never decide if Lila is enhancing the building for their benefit or to get it ready for sale. Even the big meetings held to keep everyone informed inevitably careen out of control like a wagon missing a wheel. “We’re not your charity case,” a usually sweet-tempered aunt hisses. “You walk around here thinking you’re better than the rest of us, looking at how weak and stupid we must seem, and you think, ‘That’s fine. I’ll just use my dollars to pay for the silly little flowers they can’t afford.’”

A large cast is a challenge – for a novelist and her readers – and Roy has got lots of characters spread across two continents. The initial effect feels as baffling as being introduced to every guest at another family’s reunion, but that’s the unique joy of a long novel designed by a talented writer: enough space and time to get to know these people in all their curious habits and desires. And though we usually only see them from Lila’s point of view, they each emerge as lovely and maddening as our own relatives.

Lila’s Grandma Geeta is particularly fascinating. The matriarch of the family, she would seem to have a special claim on the house, and yet she embraces Lila with warmth and enthusiasm. Great Uncle Hari, meanwhile, flaunts all his alarming contradictions, charming everyone one minute and flying into drunken rages the next. And then there are characters outside the family, like Lila’s old boyfriend, who seems irresistible again (if only he weren’t now married to a beautiful lawyer). And one of Lila’s authors from New York is convinced they’re perfect for each other. Suddenly, Lila is caught up in a romantic mess that may be even more complicated than her real estate troubles.

But Lila’s real focus is her mother, Maya, a brilliant if volatile woman who got divorced early and raised her in a cloud of shame and bitterness. “My mother’s love had always been hate,” Lila says, “and I was filled with it, inescapably.” Years of therapy have helped her deal with her mother’s flashes of anger and punishing silences, but being back in proximity with her dredges up a lifetime’s worth of resentments and injuries. Indeed, the most moving aspect of “The Magnificent Ruins” is how powerfully Roy describes what it’s like to endure a love caught in calcified rage. Even when she’s most irritated with Maya, Lila feels “a cloying sadness at the bone-deep grief that my mother carried with her every day.”

Lila’s eight-week vacation serves as a ticking timer for the novel and for the contentious relatives who hope they can run out the clock on this meddlesome young American. But other deadlines add urgency to the plot, too. Just before her departure date, for instance, the family plans to throw an enormous wedding for one of Lila’s cousins. Preparing for that elaborate party begins to drive much of Lila’s renovations on the house, even as the subterranean battle to wrest ownership away from her heats up.

All this family drama plays out against the background of a city gripped by the threat of upheaval. For an American audience unfamiliar with Indian politics, Roy deftly outlines the stakes in an upcoming election that could bring a conservative party to power and crush the liberal spirit of tolerance in Kolkata. It’s a small world after all. Eight thousand miles doesn’t feel so far away when we’re traveling with a writer this inviting.